The kids
got out of school three weeks ago. Since then we’ve taken them to one
grandmother, I spent a long weekend in Pittsburgh with my friends, and we are
now preparing to take them to visit more grandparents. Put all this in
combination with the reduced amount of time available to write and I haven’t
been able to get anything together for a while now.
Of course that doesn’t mean things
haven’t been happening that are worth talking about. We’ve been to museums. We’ve
played on the playground with school friends and hashed over the dynamics of
who got in to the accelerated program and who didn’t. We’ve been to hipster
festivals and faced the contradictions of being old and being cool. We’ve had
dinner with friends and come home wondering when we’ll ever let our children go
to someone else’s house without one of us coming along. We’ve changed our
naptime to rest time and have reaped the benefits of a happier afternoon Polly.
Each of these was worth more than one sentence and maybe in a quieter time I’ll
come back to them.
Today, however, I wanted to write
about the challenges that having kids constantly presents to what we know about
ourselves. As a person, I have a well-established sense of what I believe about
the world and what values should - in general - guide my choices. Until I had
children I didn’t have to think about these things too much because I moved
within worlds that only challenged my values sporadically. Now, however, I feel
as if Pip and Polly bring such challenges to me almost every day, from deciding
how much candy I’m willing to let them have to what clothes they should wear to
how much roughhousing is too much. In the process I’m constantly surprised
about which choices I actually make and the unrealized assumptions that
underlie them.
In the last three weeks I have stumbled
into two moments in particular where this dynamic between what I thought I knew
about myself and what I actually do has been brought into contrast.
The first came during a hike the
kids and I took two weekends ago. We went out to a gorge about an hour outside
of town that has a wonderful array of sandstone arches, rock shelters, and
little creeks and spent a full morning going working our way across a
ridgeline, down to a creek, along the gorge floor, and then back up past a huge
arch. The whole loop was about three and half miles long and to keep the kids
interested I gave them a pretty free rein to run up ahead and explore. When the
path made it down to the little rocky creek it did so in this beautiful spot
where the creek curved in a large arc and the space between was filled with
large old-growth trees and soft beds of pine needles. The kids wanted to play
in the creek, hopping along its banks and pulling up rocks to throw into the
deeper pools, but I hesitated. When out in the woods we try to practice Leave
No Trace hiking. We stay on established trails. We pack out our trash. We don’t
bring rocks home with us. By doing this we hope to preserve the wild spaces we
travel through for others to enjoy as we did.
Certainly, tearing up rocks from a
creek bed qualifies as leaving a trace. Not only that, if every group that came
through that spot tore up rocks and splashed them in the pools it would
distinctly change, if not ultimately destroy, the very thing about that spot
that made it wonderful. At the same time, I want Polly and Pip to enjoy being
out in the woods. I want them to see it as a living place where they can
explore and learn about the world and themselves. If we treat the woods as a
pristine place where things cannot be touched and moved around, where we can
only walk and look then they become as sterile and distant as a museum. Loving
the woods is as much about getting dirty, feeling the wind in one’s hair,
experiencing the rain on your skin, hearing the crunch of things around you,
feeling mud between your fingers. To not fear the woods you have to touch it.
So I let them play and splash and
run and laugh. They wound up with wet shoes and mud stained clothes and very
large smiles. I’m not sure it was the right decision in the grand scheme of
public preservation, but I know it was the right decision for our family’s
further interest in going out into the woods.
The second moment of political
difficulty involves playing soccer. Polly enjoyed playing soccer this spring
and is interested in continuing to play this fall. The league in which she
would play has a co-ed division and an all-girls division posing an interesting
gender dilemma. Ava is inclined towards the former arguing that she (and the
boys) would benefit from having her in there working and battling side-by-side.
She would conceivably have to fight more for her place in this environment, but
Ava felt like this was an important aspect of the world for her to learn to
handle. By the end of the spring season I was leaning the other way. In joining
an all girls league I felt as if Polly will get more time to handle the ball
during games and will probably find more immediate success. I felt as if this
would lead to her enjoying the game more in general and might incline her to
continue playing longer. Throughout the season I felt as if the girls on the
team deferred to the boys or waited for them to do something on the field
before following along.
While we haven’t yet made a final
decision (Polly has raised the possibility of doing gymnastics but hasn’t yet
indicated which shed select), I have come to the realization that Ava is right.
Polly should be in the co-ed league. More importantly, I am finding that my
observations about the girls’ experiences on our team may have been more
colored by certain mistaken assumptions than I understood. The two older girls
on the team were a year younger than the oldest boys. When I think back over
the season and compare those girls to the boys who were their same age instead
of too all the boys, the picture that emerges looks different that I originally
thought. The younger players, boys and girls, were always having to claw the
ball away from the older ones. Age was the great divider, not gender. The seven
year old girls were doing all the same things as the seven year old boys. Their
skill levels and strength levels were equivalent. Their successes and failures
were all very similar. Even their relations to the kids who were older and
younger were largely the same. I was just seeing the girls’ frustrations with
the older players through the wrong lens.
Raising children is eternally
humbling. It is forever revealing things about me that I never fully understood.
Some of these things are wonderful and some of these things are roundly
disappointing. Either way, it’s quite an education in itself.
